Welcome

I've been playing on and off for a decade after being introduced by a friend.

I played regularly for a few years during the poker boom and had a decent record at the micros, particularly Rush and Zoom No Limit Hold'em games (here's one of my graphs).

Around 2012 I began a new career which involved immersing myself completely in study in my spare time, so I had little to no time for poker. However recently this burden has eased and so I have been gradually dipping back in.

I'm an amateur player who still hopes to some day beat the rake.

Wednesday, 24 February 2010

Thoughts about continuation betting

Good evening, wondered if anyone had any thoughts about randomising our c-betting patterns. Really good players will not need to do this as they should hand read well enough to decipher ranges and most villains will not be doing this very well. But against thinking players I've too often felt that my play has been totally transparent and therefore I've often been played back at when bluffing obv dry boards or paired boards etc. The reason being is that my ranges obv contain too many bluffs to be believable. Well, how about using a suit or suits in our hole cards as a randomiser against these players so that we are c-betting every type of flop some percentage of the time as a bluff and therefore making our ranges difficult to decipher? Here's how it would work.c-betting draw heavy boardsMy standard approach at the moment is to check fold if we have a dangerous looking board and I've missed. But if I flop a strong draw or made hand I'll always bet. So my ranges are completely transparent and a thinking player will pretty much run me over on these flops. So, it must be necessary to at least c-bet them some small frequency as a pure bluff - even if the play has small negative expectation - since this will make villains less sure the next time we bet one of these boards. So, what if we randomise the times we bluff this board by only doing it when we have a heart as one or both of our hole cards (something that will happen a quarter of the time)? c-betting dry boardsWe should be betting dry boards pretty often since they hit our opponents range much less. But if we do it every time we become extremely exploitable to check raises or float leads etc. On the same theme, maybe we could c-bet those times we hit and the rest of the time if we have a red card as either hole card (so half the time). We hit a flop about a third of the time so this means we'd be betting at 2/3 flops but not more. This is much less exploitable than doing it to every dry board. Is it really necessary?In truth probably not, especially at the micros. But the next time I feel I'm being run over I might start randomising my play in this way and see if it helps. GL